Maxime Bocher, author of Bocher's theorem, Harvard prof, prez of @amermathsoc (in 1909): "Just as one cannot become a painter without a certain amount of skill, so one cannot become a mathematician without the power to reason accurately up to a certain point... MORE
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"...Yet these qualities, fundamental though they are, do not make a painter or mathematician worthy of the name, nor indeed are they the most important factors in the case. MORE
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"Other qualities of a far more subtle sort, chief among which in both cases is imagination, go to the making of a good artist or of a good mathematician." (http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Quotations/Bocher.html …).
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Do you have to be smart to be a research mathematician? Sure. Does the fact that black Americans score lower on IQ tests, on average, let other Americans off the hook for the extreme racial imbalance in research math? Uh, no. Because, like I DID spell out in my story, there is...
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1) no genetic evidence to suggest the average IQ gap between racial groups in America reflects genetic differences caused by natural selection acting differently on human populations in different parts of the world over millennia (their argument)
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....as opposed to environmental/cultural/political forces like centuries of legally-enforced racism that have resulted in vast racial disparities in education, income and wealth.
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2) No reason to think that even if the IQ gap is in fact partly genetic, it would not also be affected by culture/environment. (The average genetic contribution to various human behavioral traits IS likely different across geographic ancestry groups, population geneticists say...
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...there's just no evidence how different or in which directions for IQ in particular, not to mention cognition more broadly. And, the geneticists say, untangling it is going to be exceedingly hard).
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3) Most pertinent to this specific flavor of Race-IQ Twitter's interest in the right-tails of IQ curves, to which they attribute the explanation for much of social inequality: No evidence super-high I.Q. is the key to math ability, per quotes above and others (h/t
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Replying to @amy_harmon @MathPrinceps
Again this is contradicted by evidence from Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. See post by
@hsu_steve http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/02/personnel-selection-horsepower-matters.html?m=1 …1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
SMPY uses (and has always used) extremely superficial measures of mature success.
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Another example from the 'Horsepower matters' post above is a graph showing the probability of earning an A in in calculus-based introductory physics based on SAT-M (SAT is significantly g-loaded). Also, bounds on probability of graduating with a physics GPA greater than 3.5.
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Replying to @Biorealism @MathPrinceps and
Just on SMPY, quite a good New Yorker article about the ability/practice issue generally. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/practice-doesnt-make-perfect/amp …
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